An official of the American Islamic Congress has a strongly-expressed op ed in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “How Europe Bankrolls Terror.” His central thesis:

Over the past decade, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands have paid more than $130 million to terrorist groups, mostly through mediators, to free European hostages… The so-called global war on terror has been hobbled by these payoffs.

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He makes a reasonable point. But if this hobbled the fight against the terrorists, then what about the far larger sums shoveled into the maw of the Palestinian Arab terror machine throughout the past decade? And continuing. It’s a theme we have addressed here numerous times.

What we have written in those posts and keep repeating is that European tax-payers are the major source of the money that is used by terrorism-addicted regimes – in particular the Palestinian Authority or as it now prefers to call itself, “The State of Palestine” – to reward and encourage the people who have already murdered and who aspire to murder in the near future the children of the people whom their religious and secular leaders teach them to hate. Refer to the excellent, though sadly not-up-date, E.U. Funding site for more background.

In a recent post, we quoted Douglas Murray, associate director at the London-based Henry Jackson Society think-tank, who wrote about this under the headline “Palestinian Terrorists on the Payroll” [online at the WSJE site]. Here’s a reminder of a small part of what he writes there:

…Many British taxpayers, struggling to pay their family’s way through a recession, might rightly wonder why their money is going to pay as much as £2,000 a month to people serving the longest sentences—those who have targeted Israeli buses and other civilian targets with suicide bombers, for instance. That is higher than the average wage in nearly all of Britain. You might be forgiven for wondering, if you were a struggling teaching assistant in the North of England, why failing to tick “suicide bomber” on your careers form should have left you so much worse off than a terrorist in the Middle East… Most of the politicians and civil servants who facilitate this disgraceful funding process with the money of ordinary citizens know they are doing it. So do many in the news media. And when ordinary folks have it explained to them, they become furious.

So why is it that the scandal continues with so little rational intervention? It’s not a new issue. We published an article about this in a major European newspaper more than nine years ago. See the Wall Street Journal Europe, September 26, 2003 edition: “Blood, Money and Education” [online here]. It has some very critical things to say about a certain British politician who we believe was up to his eyebrows in involvement with covering up the E.U. funding of Palestinian terrorism at the time. Today he is the U.K. government’s man in charge of the BBC.

Abdullah Barghouti is just one example of how the West is funding terror. Barghouti manufactured the bomb-in-a-guitar-case for the Hamas operation that targeted the Sbarro restaurant in central Jerusalem; the explosion killed 15 people, left a 16th unconscious until today, and injured more than 130. A large proportion of the casualties were Jewish children, one of them our daughter. Barghouti’s monthly salary, amounting to thousands of shekels and growing, is paid to his family by the “moderate” P.A., largely funded by unwitting taxpayers in the U.K., India, Norway, Ireland, France, Japan and the United States, as well as from the European Union aid budget.

Frimet and Arnold Roth began writing and speaking publicly soon after the murder of their fifteen year-old daughter Malki Z"L in the Jerusalem Sbarro massacre, August 9, 2001 (Chaf Av, 5761). They have both been, and are, frequently interviewed for radio, television and the print media, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Al-Jazeera, and others. Their blog This Ongoing War deals with the under-appreciated price of living in a society afflicted by terrorism which, they contend, means the entire world. Frimet is a native of Queens, NY while her husband was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. They brought their family to settle in Jerusalem in 1988. They co-founded the Malki Foundation in 2001 and are deeply involved in its work as volunteers. They can be reached at thisoingoingwar@gmail.com .